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Community Corner

Walk for Water: SHS Teenagers Lead the Pack

The community service project of a freshman-founded club at Scarsdale High School may wind up yielding surprising results: namely, an entire well for a third-world village.

Most freshmen are happy to have just conquered the injustices of high school social strata by the time May finally rolls around.

Not the two teens who founded the Charity: Water club at Scarsdale High School – they have bigger injustices on their mind. Namely, water supply, and the shocking inequity of access to clean drinking water around the globe.

Today they're going to put sneakers to pavement and do something about it, leading a three-mile Walk for Water fundraiser that starts out at Chase Park at 11 a.m. (No, it's not too late to join up - and the first 100 walkers get free t-shirts - see details below.)

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"At first this wasn't our main objective," said Larry Milstein, 15. "This is a larger undertaking than what is required for the school credit. There was a large void in the high school clubs, and we thought, 'Why is that? Water is the most basic thing somebody needs.' "

Milstein and Ben Rosenbaum, 14, are both ninth-graders, and were friends before they started up the club this year. They knew it would be hard work. What they didn't anticipate is how much overwhelming support and interest they'd see from fellow students who actually weren't in their existing friendship circle.

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"We have  a relatively decent-sized group for a 9th-grade club; at our last meeting we had 10 people show up, and they're all really hard workers," Milstein said. "They were all just really devoted to the cause."

Added Rosenbaum, "This community is not involved in water, and there are a lot of facts that, when you look, that are surprising."

One that always stuns him, he says, is the fact that one in eight people – a billion worldwide  – don't have access to clean drinking water.

The club ultimately decided to aim for $5,000 as a fundraising goal this year, the cost of just one water well for a village.

They were still coming up short after the carnival, where they had a demonstration and booth, and with World Water Day tomororw, decided the best bet was a cash-for-registering walk that would give people the chance to feel what three miles really is.

"Mostly women and children gather the water," Rosenbaum pointed out, and then the return trip they're carrying up to 40 pounds of water in a plastic jerrycan, the kind usually issued by relief organizations.

"We're even goig to have those for people to carry if they want to feel what it's like," piped up Milstein. "Even just to pick up – it's pretty heavy to carry the whole way."

The walk will culminate in a final ceremony at the Audrey Hochberg Pond Preserve, which they noted, is a body of water like the one someone might drink out of, if they had to.

Charity: Water is a nonprofit organization founded by a former New York City nightclub promoter, and the profits from the walk – which has so far sold 70 to 80 tickets – will be going towards some of the 2,524 projects the company has enabled since 2006. In just three and a half years, the organization has helped build drinking wells in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, India, the Ivory Coast, Central Africa, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda, and has tracked stories of the work they've done with photos, testimonials, and videos, which are on the organization's website.

One of the reasons they chose the group? Larry Milstein had heard from a friend of his at the Horace Mann School, who watched a presentation about the group's work and had been involved with a school fundraising effort. Also, the club's treasurer Caroline, had met the founder, Scott Harrison, through her father's work, and had great things to say about the charity.

To participate in tomorrow's walk, bring cash or check for the $20 entry fee to Chase Park tomorrow for the walk, at 11 a.m.

To prepay, or to just donate to the club's goal, you can reach Ben Rosenbaum at 914-874-6353 or Larry Milstein at 914-874-6142 or e-mail shscharitywater@gmail.com.

The walk is expected to finish at 1:15 p.m. with a closing ceremony at Aubdrey Hochberg Pond Preserve, behind the Scarsdale Library.

More information on Charity: Water.

statistics That Shock Ben - and should shock you, too - about the global water crisis:
  • 1 out of every 8 people does not have access to clean drinking water (that's almost a billion people)!
  • Millions of women and children walk over 3 miles a day to collect water.  And sadly, the only water they usually can obtain is taken from contaminated sources.
  • Unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all disease in the world.
  • Clean water is readily available underground…it just needs to be properly collected and managed.
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